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16GB of RAM Could Be the New Minimum in Apple's Upcoming M4 Macs
(www.macrumors.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Agreed, I typed quickly before bed and meant MST not alt mode.
But otherwise you're just arguing that it's not a big deal because 'you don't need any of these fancy features if you throw out your monitor every three years and buy new thousand dollar ones'.
For everyone who doesn't want to contribute to massive piles of e-waste, we still have 1080p and 1440p, 60Hz monitors kicking around, and there is no excuse for a Mac to only be able to drive one of them with crappy looking text. It could easily drive 6 within the bandwidth of a 4k, 120Hz signal. Hell it could drive 8 or more if you drop the refresh down to 30.
I'm not generally arguing it's not a big deal. I'm actually saying the regular M chips should be upgraded to M "Pro" levels of display support. But beyond two external displays, yes, I'm arguing it's not a big deal, simply because >99% of users don't want to use more than two external displays (no matter the resolution). Even if I had 6 old displays lying around I would hardly use more than two of them for a single computer. And as long as I'm not replacing all 6 displays with 6 new displays it doesn't make a difference in terms of e-waste. On the contrary I'd use way more energy driving 6 displays simultaneously.
I'm 100% with you that MST should be supported, but not because driving six displays (per stream) is something I expect many people to do, but because existing docking solutions often use MST to provide multiple (2) DisplayPort outputs. My workplace has seats with a USB-C docking station connected to two WQHD displays via MST, and they'd all need replacing should we ever switch to MacBooks.
And sure, they should bring back proper font rendering on lower resolution displays. I personally haven't found it to be too bad, but better would be ... better, obviously. And as it already was a feature many moons ago, it's kind of a no-brainer.